Lagos - Scores of people were feared dead on Sunday after a bomb attack
on a church in the central Nigerian city of Jos during a Sunday
service, the government said.
Government spokesman Pam Ayuba said a bomb exploded near the church, adding that government sources feared "scores" of people had been killed and injured after the church collapsed with the force of the explosion.
Ayuba said the bombing of the God Chosen Church could be a "sustained war of attrition on our people by enemies of the state," which he said "has been going on for a while now".
A series of bomb blasts in the state and the country have been claimed by Boko Haram Islamist sect, he said.
The Boko Haram insurgency has killed more than 1 000 people since mid-2009, especially in Nigeria's Muslim-dominated north.
The local co-ordinator of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Alhassan Danjuma Aliyu, told AFP that the wounded had been taken to the Jos University hospital. He did not give any numbers.
Boko Haram's attacks have grown increasingly sophisticated and have affected a wider area, spreading from their base in the northeast across the wider north and down to the capital Abuja, in the centre of the country.
It claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing of UN headquarters in Abuja in August which killed at least 25 people as well as a suicide attack on the Abuja office of one of the country's most prominent newspapers.
The group has continually widened its targets, which have included security forces, churches and police headquarters in the capital. Jos lies on the fault line between the Muslim-majority north and the Christian-dominated south.
Government spokesman Pam Ayuba said a bomb exploded near the church, adding that government sources feared "scores" of people had been killed and injured after the church collapsed with the force of the explosion.
Ayuba said the bombing of the God Chosen Church could be a "sustained war of attrition on our people by enemies of the state," which he said "has been going on for a while now".
A series of bomb blasts in the state and the country have been claimed by Boko Haram Islamist sect, he said.
The Boko Haram insurgency has killed more than 1 000 people since mid-2009, especially in Nigeria's Muslim-dominated north.
The local co-ordinator of the National Emergency Management Agency (NEMA), Alhassan Danjuma Aliyu, told AFP that the wounded had been taken to the Jos University hospital. He did not give any numbers.
Boko Haram's attacks have grown increasingly sophisticated and have affected a wider area, spreading from their base in the northeast across the wider north and down to the capital Abuja, in the centre of the country.
It claimed responsibility for a suicide bombing of UN headquarters in Abuja in August which killed at least 25 people as well as a suicide attack on the Abuja office of one of the country's most prominent newspapers.
The group has continually widened its targets, which have included security forces, churches and police headquarters in the capital. Jos lies on the fault line between the Muslim-majority north and the Christian-dominated south.
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